


Bruises In The Mirror.

by wily_one24



Series: Bruises [2]
Category: Veronica Mars - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-06
Updated: 2008-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-05 11:49:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wily_one24/pseuds/wily_one24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sweat and sex and lust without passion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bruises In The Mirror.

**Author's Note:**

> **Rating:** R, for language, some sexual and dark themes.  
>  **Pairing:** Logan/Veronica.  
>  **Warnings:** Not an entirely happy fic, some dark themes, probably not popular.  
>  **Spoilers:** It’s not really an AU, so much as it is a Parallel-U of Season One, so if you’ve seen that season, you’re fine. Otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend it.  
>  **Disclaimer:** Not mine, this is why.

*****  
BRUISES IN THE MIRROR  
**

***

She doesn’t know how she gets herself into these things.

Honestly, it was an easy set up, foolproof. Drunken party, no adult supervision, mind-boggling amount of drugs, the execution should have been painless and swift. One clear photo of her mark perpetuating one of countless sleazy dealings.

What she gets instead is the sight of one of her greatest adversaries being unceremoniously dumped onto the curb amid a maelstrom of jeers and cursing. He stumbles clumsily, obviously drunk and god knows what else, shouting back at his supposed friends who leave him slumped by the side of the road. Their consciences clear.

As she watches a well-aimed shoe tumbles toe over heel, bouncing along the cement until it hits him in the shoulder. Sure enough, when she checks, he’s barefoot. She should leave him there. She should film it for prosperity. She should throw her own shoes; they’re much sharper.

What she does, and for the life of her she can never figure out why, is help him.

He’s drunk and resistive and combative and his eloquence really hasn’t improved with the alcohol, but this side of him is easier to ignore. People get mean and careless when they drink; she knows that well enough. It’s his sober, too precise, cutting barbs that really hurt.

She guides him into his house, a place that is both strange and recognizable, and feels odd inside the walls she knows she’s unwelcome, but still knows so well.

By the time they get to his room he’s slurring various insults at her, not original enough to stick, and she’s just tired. Her job is done and she pushes him towards the bed with more than a little force, telling him to sleep it off.

He’s quicker than she would have imagined, rising back up into her face, and the venom with which he calls her names is familiar. Bitch. Slut. Traitor. All the old gems. She yawns, disinterested, and moves towards the door, waving a cheery goodbye.

His hand catches her wrist and she pulls hard to release it. His fingers tighten and, in a quick flash of panic, all she can hear is the hardness in his voice and not the actual words, her skin pulls hard against his, but it’s not enough.

She’s spun in a circle to face him, but the doorjamb gets in the way and she tastes blood, hot and salty, as the pain radiates in a thick, nauseating wave down her chin. It echoes through her skull.

His eyes are wide and focus-less. In an instant, as her fingers rise to feel the growing lump and flowing blood, she can see the night as it’s been for him. It’s a lot more than vodka and tequila shots. He’s higher than Fast Eddie down at the bus stop.

He used to be so nice.

That’s the one, tired, faulty, weak little thought that registers inside her mind as her mouth loses all control. She doesn’t exactly know what she’s saying, a lot of cursing and blame and accusation, but somewhere deep inside she gets the feeling it’s not just about tonight or the split lip.

_I’m sorry_

It’s all he can seem to say, wide-eyed and shocked, and all the words do is make her angrier. She wants to hurt him, to finally find the right words to flay him alive after what he’s put her through, wants to just walk away and forget he ever existed.

She tells him to leave her alone.

This, apparently, translates into him slamming her against the wall. As she hits forward, fist raised, trying to push him away from her, he closes in and captures her wrists between their chests. It’s a struggle as she tries to move, tries to find an open space, and he closes his fingers hard against the bones in her hand.

He tells her, in a surprised and somewhat shocked voice, that she’s beautiful just before he kisses her.

She lifts her knee up hard and makes him groan.

There’s something in his eyes, past the alcohol fugue and drug haze, something close to anger and hatred and lust that scares her beyond the point of retaliation and she freezes as he uses one hand to hold her chin still, fingertips closing hard into the bones of her face, and licks the blood off her swollen bottom lip.

_Stop it. Please, just… stop…_

He moans the words into the side of her face, mouthing the line of her jaw to her ear, and their hands scratch uselessly at each other, her trying to free them and him trying to keep her there.

_Stop… fighting… me._

She knows it’s over when he gets both her wrists in one hand above her head and begins tearing at the buttons of her shirt with the other. His mouth suckles lines down the front of her throat and she feels her nipples tighten as fresh air hits them. Resistance or arousal, she’s not even sure there’s a difference at this point.

If she closes her eyes, she can almost picture a different setting. Somewhere, in the far reaches of her brain, she knows this is a little fucked up, a little too desperate, that it crosses the line so completely there is no going back. But, a little closer to the forefront, she’s highly aware that this is the first time in over a year that anyone has touched her with desire, with appreciation.

And she can pretend it doesn’t scare her when his hand travels further south and begins playing with the button of her jeans. She can pretend she’s in control as she throws her head back against the wall and stares at the ceiling as he slips his fingers into her.

He says he wants her, but she knows different.

He’s never wanted her, not before and not now. She doesn’t know the why or the wherefore, but she’s not going to lie to herself about the what. He’s out of it and she could probably be anyone, any girl whose jeans are stripped down her legs, material pulling roughly against the inner flesh of her thighs.

Suddenly she wants to be someone else, anyone else. Someone who does these kinds of things and doesn’t care. Someone who not only lets themselves be pushed and pulled towards the bed, but also enjoys it. Someone who doesn’t know how to fear it.

She squeezes her eyes shut and splays her thighs open, forces herself to dig deep into her reserves for some form of pleasure, some form of validation for what she’s doing.

It sparks slowly and briefly, but it’s there, buried deep in memories of better times.

He finishes before her, rolling off and away with a grunt and a half expected slur of how the rumors really were true. She doesn’t care; not really, she tells herself that it’s not this boy and not this world.

He’s obviously not happy with her continued lack of response; she can feel it in the change of energy, the sudden clarity in his voice. He has a mission, a purpose, something to funnel his last remaining shreds of sobriety into.

He wants to hurt her, really hurt her, and he won’t stop at anything to do it.

She’s heard the names and she knows his weaponry, all the usual accusations and she lies on her back staring at the ceiling. She thinks to herself _you used to be my friend_ and runs her fingers over the slightly raised ridges of his fingerprints on her skin.

Her muscles are tired and her body refuses to work, even as she tells herself to stand, to move, to get up and out of this bed that now stinks of sweat and sex and lust without passion. It crawls over her skin and she imagines she can separate the different molecules of them by sense alone, that she can feel the hostility of him in countless dots on her flesh, mingling with the more familiar ones of hers.

He tells her to get out, get the fuck out of his bed, his house, his life and she can feel it coming, but she closes her eyes too slowly, hesitates too long to build proper defenses against him and he slips right in. There’s nothing left, he tells her, she’s nothing but a clone, a cheap tarnished two dollar version of someone long gone.

_Face it, you’re nothing but a pathetic, bargain basement Lilly._

Her brain doesn’t protest the words so much as her stomach, roiling and boiling against the image that slaps her physically, and suddenly she’s pushing against him, pushing him down, frantically crawling over his body and scrambling off the bed.

She wants to run as far as humanly possible, but her body has other ideas and she slams the bathroom door shut before furiously twisting the knobs on the shower. The water cascades down over her limbs, hot and scalding, and no matter how long she stays there the night doesn’t wash off.

***

She tells herself she’s ready for it.

Whatever brand of punishment he’s going to dish out, she’s prepared. No matter what he says or how much he distorts the story, no matter how everyone reacts, she’s lived through worse. But he doesn’t torture her with it; he doesn’t take the one horrifically mistaken night and turn it against her. It’s his best ammo and he’s not using it.

Instead, he follows her around and she watches the expression in his eyes change from anger and hostility to regret and something even more awful. Something like interest.

She becomes an expert in avoiding him, predicting his moves and keeping a step or two ahead. And as she deletes his messages and ignores his repeated pleas for her time and attention, she tells herself that it’s not going to happen again.

She tells him the same thing the night he comes to her apartment, finally cornering her where she can’t ignore or escape him.

He begs and he pleads and he apologizes and she wonders why it’s supposed to make any kind of a difference. Nothing he has done in the last twelve months can be absolved with desperate words; she’s not as easy as his rich friends. She’s not going to roll over and play dead just because he mouths insincere apologies.

She’s going to yell. And yelling feels so good, especially aimed at him. The words spill out, all those dangerous words that have been tumbling around her head all year. It feels so good, this release, that she loses track of what she’s saying. She loses track of her words and she loses track of herself.

She yells, he yells, they yell, like some dysfunctional child’s book, and then suddenly he’s kissing her again, pushing her back, and her knees relent. Her legs buckle and they fall down together, even as she tries to scratch her way out.

***

She gets the phone call in the middle of the night.

Hushed and embarrassed, the reluctant voice practically begs her to come get him and she briefly considers telling them all to go to hell. He’s their problem now. But she knows, she’s always known, that she won’t turn away a friend, even an old one who hates her. It’s just one of the luxuries they robbed from her.

As she drives, her fingers tighten on the wheel. He’s drunk again, drunk and dangerous and unpredictable. Her brain floods with scattered memories. Him and the way they all used to be, him and the way he turned on her, him and the dull ache of her head hitting the wood, him and the emptiness in them both.

She tells him to get in the car and she watches him like a hawk, watches every movement and catalogues them, processes them, rates them in a little list of misdeeds she’s already judged him for.

She watches him like a hawk, but she still gets caught. He pushes her down to his bed and she sighs as she stares at the ceiling, wondering how and why.

***

He’s cocky and arrogant and everything she says she hates and she can’t say no to him.

She watches the news with a bad taste in her mouth. She says it’s the sight of his smug grin and the way he plays the world, but there’s something wrong with the picture, something so very wrong she can’t name. It must be in his eyes and she bites her tongue.

Something’s wrong and she knows who’s going to pay the eventual price.

Her, in the middle of the night, as he knocks on her bedroom window. He’s never come to the apartment before, not with her father in the next room, and she only wonders about his foolishness for a second, about her own, before she lets him in and locks the door.

His entire body trembles, like a stallion roped down and held back, itching for movement, and her mouth runs dry as her hand runs down his arm and leads him to the bed.

He’s not angry, he’s not even there, he’s somewhere far far away and for the first time she lets herself touch him, lets her fingers mould themselves to his skin and run soothing patterns down his sides.

He cries and pretends he doesn’t, she sees and doesn’t mention it, and they both lie there afterwards as if it isn’t the most fucked up thing in the entire world.

***

She lies all the time now.

The ease with which she can smile at her father and spin a web of intricacy is almost frightening. It hurts her to look into his smiling, trusting eyes and lie to him, but she knows without doubt it is infinitely preferable than the look he would give if he knew the truth.

Her best friend knows she’s lying when she does it, she can see it in his eyes, but he doesn’t ask and this is why he’s her best friend. It’s a weak excuse and it’s not going to last long. She overcompensates with cookies and movie nights and painful lunches spent at the jock table and silently thanks him despite the betrayed look on his face.

She lies all the time, so it’s only fair that her entire life turns out to be the biggest lie of all.

She isn’t who she thinks she is, she never was, and suddenly she’s floating and drifting in a state of fragile bewilderment. She’s insubstantial and airy, about to float away into nothing, losing her grip on the earth beneath her feet, never to come down again.

It’s the groundlessness that scares her most and she drives to his house without thinking. If he can use her, then she can use him. It’s that simple.

He’s surprisingly supplicant with her, lets her take the upper hand and she grits her teeth as she takes his clothes, lets her hands explore his body with more abandon than she has allowed yet, grits her teeth and tests the boundaries, pushing and pushing and pushing until he can’t take it anymore.

She gives away the last of her control with something akin to relief.

***

His mother dies and the thing that surprises her most is that she actually cares about his pain.

She’s not welcome in his grief, they don’t talk, they don’t communicate with anything other than their bodies, so that’s what she does. She waits separate and apart, waits for him in his room, sitting on his bed with her hands clasped, silently eyeing his walls and the undeniable presence of happier times with a dead girl, until he meets her there.

As she softly, mutely, gently takes off her clothes and his, she wonders when she stopped fighting it, when she gave herself over from trying to conserve whatever self-respect she had to this docile creature that not only obeys his silent cues, but also reads them expertly and anticipates them.

As his hands trail distractedly on her skin, pushing open her legs, and his eyes look at her like she’s a puzzle to solve, she wonders exactly when he stopped using himself as a weapon against her, when he started to learn her.

And as he stops what he’s doing and leans in to cry against her belly, she wonders when their hate fuelled lust turned into this comfort-seeking quest. Her legs close around his ribs and her hands run soothing patterns down his back and from somewhere deep inside her voice hums a tuneless cooing sound.

She gives him what she never had and wonders why.

***

It’s like a game she plays with herself.

Walking the halls at school is perilous now and she likes to see how far she can take it, how far she can push that line until he breaks, until he just can’t stand it anymore and pulls her into a closet or empty room. The longer they both last, the more brutal the eventual explosion becomes and she is always surprised by the passion in his eyes and the heat he pours out over her.

The days taste like expectation, worn thin and fragile, and sometimes the only way to ease the pressure is to press his buttons. She thinks maybe the line between pleasure and pain is getting thinner and thinner and she should stop herself before things go too far.

She thinks maybe it’s too late for that.

***

She doesn’t recognize herself anymore.

There are so many parts being played she thinks she’s lost the reality of who she really is. There’s the girl who smiles and makes pithy jokes with her father, self-depreciation covering a deeper meaning, the light hearted trickster who can solve any case presented to her and chew a stick of gum at the same time. There’s the girl who smiles over the lunch table and defies the dark worried eyes of her best friend, who feigns interest in basketball and is sincere in her love for Golden Tee. There’s the girl who walks the halls of school with her head held high who seems like she doesn’t hear the snide comments all around, doesn’t see the words written on her locker or the looks passed her way.

Then there’s the girl who gives herself to someone who can’t stand to look at her during the day. She thinks she hates this girl.

She wonders what the real her would be like, seen through the eyes of someone separate and apart from her history and present, someone who doesn’t know the whole sordid story. And one day, when that someone asks her to dinner, she says yes and doesn’t know why.

It’s normal, it’s everyday and, strangely enough, it’s pleasant. He picks her up on time, with flowers and a dramatic bowing gesture at her door, he makes comfortable small talk in the car on the way to the restaurant, he gives her an amused look when she orders wine and then discreetly orders water instead. He makes a mildly amusing joke and she laughs, somewhat surprised at the tinkling sound coming from her own throat.

Sometime over the main meal the illusion shatters. All the fairytale banners and brightly lit futures begin to melt down like wax over a tapered candle. He begins asking her about herself and her throat thickens with every lie. It’s not like she can tell him the truth. She doesn’t think he’d appreciate hearing about her number one enemy who, with increasing regularity, does things to her even _Penthouse_ would be too embarrassed to publish.

So she eats quickly, says goodnight even quicker, and makes her way to a hostile house where she’s always welcome.

She doesn’t even know why, it’s not like they’re exclusive or she owes him any favors. Her guilt is misplaced and out of line. She doesn’t tell him what she’s done, but it doesn’t matter. He grabs her wrist roughly and pulls her into his bathroom with the pent up energy of an animal that has paced a cage all evening.

His ferocity scares her a little, makes her tremble and she has to hold on tight to the bench in front of her as he brands her skin with his touch, fingers pressing so deep into her flesh she can feel her own pulse struggling to get through.

Their eyes meet in the mirror and what she sees there makes the breath catch in her throat. Not only is he angry, he’s _possessive_ and it makes a chill run through her. And as the tops of her thighs graze on the bench, she groans low in her throat, needy and demanding.

He plays her like a fine tuned instrument, fingers plunging and pulling all the right places, thrusting just far enough before stopping at exactly the right time to make her cry out, to make her beg, to make her desperate enough to do anything, anything, just… don’t… stop…

He makes her say his name, over and over again, and with each demand he’s really asking her a different question. She gives the same answer, saying the syllables of his name like a mantra, until the shape of them is all her mouth knows or wants.

He leeches all the strength from her bones and she goes limp against the counter, gasping, and drawing ragged breaths into her lungs. All she can do is taste the shape of his name and all she can feel is his body pressed up and into hers, all over, not even an inch between them.

_Mine_

A low, soft growl in her ear and she comes again.

She tells the deputy the following morning that she can’t see him again and, though she doesn’t know him at all, he can read through all her lies.

***

His body is warm and too comfortable.

She shouldn’t like it as much as she does, lying in his bed next to him as he sleeps. Her eyes travel the length of him, well proportioned and just toned enough, ridges and lines and hollows, smooth skin that rises and falls when he breathes.

Her hands know the shape of him; have traveled over great expanses of stomach and neck and back and thigh. She knows the divot of his navel and the jutting of his collarbone. She knows the shiny pink callous lines of scars on his back.

His body is warm and too comfortable and she’s only going to get hurt, so she forces herself to pull away in the middle of the night, forces herself to think about having to procure yet another fabricated alibi for her father, forces herself to think about the whispers and sly looks, anything that motivates her enough to leave.

Leaving is her self-preservation.

It only stands to reason that he takes that from her too.

 _Stay_.

With one carelessly spoken word he utilizes her one weakness, the inability to say no to him. And in that instant the excuses and defenses she’s built all fade away and she’s lost in the confusion of both wanting and fearing the same thing.

He doesn’t laugh at her anymore, he’s no longer cruel, privately and in public, and it’s been so long since those first few times that she can barely remember the feel of bruises on her skin, but he still holds the capacity to hurt her with surgical precision.

She lies with her eyes open and her body tense as he falls asleep curled up behind her.

His body is warm and too comfortable.

***

She’s tired.

Tired of running around in circles and getting nowhere. Tired of making up thinner and thinner lies for her father that she’s not even sure he bothers to believe anymore. Tired of the disgust that springs from her best friend’s disappointment. Tired of butting into brick wall after brick wall, of finding a thousand new questions for every answer. Tired of the looks and sly digs and comments and suggestions from everyone around her.

Mostly, she’s just tired of pretending that this entire situation is working.

Her fingers shake when she dials his number, tremble like they did when she signed the cheque, signed away her life’s savings. He answers breathlessly and before she knows what’s happening he’s telling her to wait for him.

The wait, mere hours, seems long, too long, and she passes her time sitting on the same stool her mother did, idly stirring her glass with an out of place, brightly colored swizzle stick. It seems almost fitting that she swallows the bitter tasting liquid, tasting the despair that must make up her mother’s existence.

He finds her wilting, like flowers left without water, and she’s so tired she can barely lift her limbs.

She wants to sleep, a thousand years worth of sleep so that when she wakes up everything and everyone will be different and nothing of her real life will remain. She wants to stay seated, not moving, slowly sinking into oblivion.

Somehow she ends up being led to a small hotel room and the dreariness seems almost a foregone conclusion.

She’s so tired she can barely move and she eyes the bed in the middle of the room with trepidation, a tinge of reluctance, but mostly resignation as she forces herself to lift her hands and undo the zip of her hoodie. This is what they do and this is what he wants.

She doesn’t expect him to stop her and she has no reserves to do anything but follow when he sits her down and begins to tend to her. He’s so gentle he almost hurts.

And when he asks her what happened, she’s not sure where to begin and she has no ready answer, words begin to fall out of her mouth. Once they start, they flow uncontrollably, waterfalls of truths stumble out of her mouth, choking her with their rush to finally be spoken.

It aches like the echo of infection being released.

He pulls her down on the bed with him and she crumples limply, fully clothed, into his arms. She feels it thickly, through the molasses of the past day and week and year, that strange and elusive creature called comfort.

She falls asleep before he does and wakes in the morning cuddled up to his side, feeling more refreshed than she remembers in a long, long time.

***

Sometimes she thinks it’s not as dysfunctional as it started out to be.

He’s nice, in a weirdly absent way. In some ways, he’s almost charmingly nervous around her, lost like a little boy in a mall. In some lights he almost looks peaceful with her, yearning, wanting. She sees him watching her sometimes, across the hall, across the schoolyard, and his expression when he doesn’t know he’s being watched is almost tender.

Almost.

There are times she doesn’t think of the whys and hows and the way it used to be compared to the way it is now. Times such as when he’s buried so far deep inside that she swears she can feel his pulse compete with hers.

He takes his time now, careful, thoughtful, knowing. He knows little tricks about her body that she blushes just thinking about. Like the spot on her neck that makes her moan like a B-grade porn star or the magic combination of lick suck scrape of lips and teeth that make the underside of her breasts seem like a tequila shot.

He stocks his fridge with her favorite soda and when she’s lying spent on his sheets, limbs leeched of all their strength, recovering from a powerful orgasm, he brings her glasses beading with condensation and clinking with ice cubes.

He covers with short words and lack of eye contact, but underneath it all she can hear what almost sounds like begging when he tells her to stay, when he holds out his hands and draws her back into his bed. He likes to sleep holding her, hands cupping her hip, her shoulder, her breast, finding a comfortable rest in the curves of her. He likes to sleep with his nose buried in her hair.

And the moment that he comes, he does it looking into her eyes, her name on his lips.

***

Her brain wanders of its own accord.

In the middle of the night she feels him between her legs, feels his hands on her body, the thrust and pull of him, she can taste him on her tongue and smell him in her nostrils, he’s everywhere around her. She can pick him out of a crowd by his scent alone, she can tell when he’s been in a room she enters.

He’s everywhere and it scares her a little. He’s become too much and she’s not sure she should continue encouraging it, but she’s not sure she knows how to stop. She imagines a world where she doesn’t bend to his every whim and whimsy and sometimes the picture it paints doesn’t leave an ache in her chest, boring and dull, but honest and she thinks happy.

But most of all, as he places his hands on either side of her hips and increases his speed, tries to bring her back, she thinks of a world where he doesn’t ask her to, where he never started some stupid war in the first place, where their relationship developed from childhood friends to something deeper without the horrible twist in the middle.

In that place he brings her flowers and she laughs at some stupid joke, they go out on dates to nice restaurants and he orders her dessert without needing to ask, she invites him back to the apartment for dinner and isn’t too embarrassed to tell her father, he puts his arm around her at school and nobody jeers and makes obscene comments.

When he rolls her over and forces her to look in his eyes, he asks her where she is.

It chokes her a little when she tells him anywhere but here.

***

He grows tense sometimes.

She can feel it in the way he watches her, catalogues her every movement like she’s an animal behind a glass cage. It sits like a frown on his forehead, crinkled and fretful, and she wishes she knew what he was thinking. And sometimes, when she’s not with him and she’s laughing with someone else, she can see his eyes narrow and she wishes she didn’t know.

The possessiveness slides over her skin like a cloying blanket when he pulls her into his arms.

He has no right to look at her like that. Every claim he has ever staked on her or her time has been in private, for all his pleading and all his grandstanding, he hides her like a shameful secret and she’s left standing cold and alone.

He has no right, because once upon a time she had friends she could turn to, him being one of them, until he turned the tide against her and stole everyone she ever counted on.

_So, what is it between you and that Fennel kid?_

His question slaps her physically in ways she thought she was finally immune to. She shouldn’t be surprised, she shouldn’t be hurt after all this time, and she hates that she is, she hates that it surprises her. As if pain from him is supposed to be unexpected.

_Don’t._

She unwraps his hands from her, one finger at a time, peeling them from her skin like an unwanted blanket. The ceiling of his room is horridly familiar as she lies there and stares upwards. She’s seen it so many times; lay here staring so many times that she could find the ceiling studs without having to knock.

Everything she’s been thinking, everything that has been trying to force itself to the front of her mind crashes through like a bolt of lightning, zapping through her skull and choking her, making her tongue thick and unwieldy.

_What the hell do you want from me?_

He doesn’t answer, just stares at her with a wide, gaping mouth and blank expression. She doesn’t think she can take it anymore.

_He’s just a friend. He’s the only friend I have left. Let me have that, at least._

She thinks about everything she’s given up because of this boy and it makes her ache. When he asks her what she means she can’t tell whether he’s being deliberately dense or if he’s truly clueless, and the reminder that he just doesn’t care enough to know the difference makes tears prickle her eyes.

 _I have nothing left, you saw to that. You took…_ It all flashes in her mind and the tears threaten to choke her until she swallows. _Do you know how many lies I have to tell? For months… my dad… I swear…_

And she bites down on the emotion, because it’s not going to do her any good and giving him another weakness to exploit is nothing but foolishness. It breaks inside her and she finds a pool of indifference she never knew was there.

 _Everyone knows._ Suddenly it hits her, what she needs to do, and hurting him is as simple as pointing out the truth. _You can’t hide it. They already know what you don’t. What you refuse to._

He touches her and she lets him, lets herself feel it, and breathes in the sense of his fingernail scraping the molecules of her arm. He asks what she wants, what he can do, and it’s all just too little too late. She can hear the sudden fear in his voice and she wonders exactly what he thinks he’s losing.

She wonders exactly what he sees when he looks at her, what he saw then and what he sees now.

It doesn’t really matter, because she can’t stay with him in his bed in his house, in his arms, she has to get up now and leave or be stuck forever. It doesn’t matter that he seems genuinely concerned, it doesn’t matter that he’s looking at her now with something akin to awe, because there’s not enough of her left to change her mind. He saw to that.

 _I’m just your whore._ The words come brutally, a harsh reality that she thinks he needs slapped into him. _Let’s keep it that way and not confuse things._

His hallways stretch with absurd shadows as she walks away in the middle of the night.

***

He asks her out on a Thursday, casual and carefree, in front of a crowd.

She’s not sure exactly what his game plan is, but it tickles something in the back of her mind. Heat floods her cheek and she has to get herself up and away and out of there before she does something embarrassing. He doesn’t get an answer, but she knows that he doesn’t really need one.

She finds out about the drugs on the Friday morning.

***

She used to believe in a lot of things.

_Perfect lives and best friends and birthday parties and Prince Charming and Santa. She used to use pink glitter pens to write birthdays in her school organizer, green for anniversaries, she used to think nothing could be as important as finding the _ohmygod_ perfect shade of lipstick to match her sweater._

She chokes above the toilet bowl, vomit coming thick and fast, as thinks about all the times she let him touch her.

_There were parties on the beach, with mildly cool and rapidly warming flat keg beer in plastic cups, the crackle of a fire and the feel of strong arms around her with the smell of salt and ocean and the taste of purloined wine coolers drying between her teeth._

She remembers that first time, when he was too out of it to know what he was doing, when she left lip-bloodied and swollen with the sound of his vitriol echoing in her head and she wonders if that wasn’t closer to the true him than what he’s been showing her lately.

_Slipping into the top of the social hierarchy was seamless, the cool table, the cool friends, cool clothes and a certain air of invulnerability. Pep squad wasn’t a choice, it was a natural evolution._

He hates her. She has to keep reminding herself of that fact when she remembers the warm look in his eyes when she wakes up and finds him watching her. He hates her and he brought GHB to a party where she was drugged and raped. It taints the last few months of their time together. He hates her, he’s hated her for a long time, and she needs to stop kidding herself to the lengths he will go to prove that fact.

_There was security in the knowledge that the sky was blue, the grass was green, and she was loved no matter what she did. Her mother smiled while folding laundry, and her father laughed over steaks grilling_

She needs to shower, to feel hot water on her body, and she frantically paws at her skin as her brain is sadistic in the images it shows. His hands all over her, guiding and pushing and stroking, and she can’t stop wondering if they’d touched her before. As the heat brings deep red molecules closer to the surface of her skin and she drags the soap over filmy lines of suds over and over again, she hears two words repeat themselves in a sickening echo.

Did he? Did he? Did he?

_She used to run a lot. Careless, frantic, playful running, feet pounding on the pavement until the impact reverberated up through her kneecaps, until her lungs swelled and burned with the desperate need for oxygen, until her head swam with it. Someone would always catch her if she fell. She used to believe in a lot of things, perfect lives and best friends and birthday parties and Prince Charming and Santa. She no longer cleans up her act come December._

_And she doesn’t run much anymore, either._

Did he? She wraps herself in her robe and towels her hair with her eyes closed. Did he? She goes over those few brief minutes she remembers of the party, lights and faces and scorn. Did he? She hears the months after, the repetition of all those nasty names and rumors in his voice. Did he?

Her stomach rolls and grinds and threatens to rebel as a knock sounds on her door and all she can do is thank several dozen higher powers that her father is out, because she knows. She can sense that things have reached a boiling point. Of course it’s him when she opens the door, of course it is, and the remembered salty taste of him is faintly sour in her mouth, cloying against her gag reflex, as she meets his eyes for the first time in a week.

Did he?

***

It’s like a slap in the face, even when she finds out it wasn’t him.

The real problem stems from the fact that she didn’t know. Months spent with him in the most personal of ways and she still had no idea, no confidence in him, no way of knowing. She can’t live like this anymore, with all the lies and the secrets and the silent hoping that things will get better.

Something is going to snap and she needs to make a change before it’s her.

It wasn’t him, but he’s still too destructive to be around. So she steels herself for the inevitable and continues to avoid him, ducking his all too familiar form in the hallways during the day and lying on her cold, empty sheets at night.

It’s surprising how much it hurts and she feels weaker for it, doesn’t understand why she would want or need something so caustic. So she ignores it, doesn’t acknowledge that slight ache when she sees him at school.

She certainly doesn’t watch him out of the corner of her eye, following the line of his back and neck, greedily storing away the shapes of him in her memory. She doesn’t do that, because she doesn’t need him and she doesn’t need the tornado he brings.

It’s a bitter surge of relief, a deep, throbbing knot in the back of her throat when Beaver tells her about TJ. She can’t even pretend to smile, a tight wad of nerves on her face, when she agrees with her father to go to the police.

It sounds like something that would happen to her.

***

Fire and gasoline curl into her lungs.

Sharp, thin fingers of it itching down her bronchi and scraping new patterns through the bronchioles and alveoli, wrapping themselves around her airways and squeezing tight with every breath.

The fight to find clean air puts her in a stupor, a heady, heavy daze of stupidity made worse by the dregs of adrenaline swirling thickly in her blood. A cacophony of sound and voices and faces blur in front of her and all she can do is watch every breath her father takes, unconscious and hooked to machines.

Her fingers clutch a thick padded jacket to her shoulders, a source of subtle heat that seems to defy the obscene flash of flames still stark in her mind.

Commotion rouses her, makes her blink, and she watches distantly for several seconds as he fights to pass security. She moves on autopilot, without thinking, without waiting to be told. Nodding a goodbye to her father’s girlfriend who has been trying to convince her to go home and rest for the past hour, she walks over to his side and waits.

Funny, how even when the back of her brain tries to remind her why she’d stopped going to him and why it was a bad idea, that the rest of her body sighs with relief.

It’s like she can’t function, can’t move on her own, and she’s grateful that he’s willing to do it for her.

Everything is speeding up or slowing down, she can’t quite tell, can’t quite pause long enough to figure everything out, because stopping is thinking and thinking is remembering and remembering is impossible. So she lets it all slide by, watching from a distance, an observer and not a participant.

The night sky is littered with stars, tiny little explosions of gas from trillions of years before. Her neck cranes to get a better view out of the window of his car, eyes glued to the darkness. A tired, blank, over romanticized portion of her brain remembers stories her grandmother used to tell about stars being the souls of people passed away.

They used to give her nightmares and she’d wake up with her heart beating erratically and her throat closed tightly around the images of being trapped inside a bubbling, boiling mass of hot light, smelling strongly of sulfur and desperation.

She looks at each and every star and wonders which was supposed to be her.

She can smell the alcohol on him, even if she can’t see it. He doesn’t falter, doesn’t slur or misstep and she doesn’t wince at the thought of it. She almost wishes she had alcohol to numb the night.

He stands at a loss next to her, eyes searching, and she thinks he must be reading the night off her skin, off the very surface of her. When he asks her what she wants to do, the answer comes to her mind automatically.

I want to go to sleep and never wake up.

But she doesn’t say it out loud. Her throat and her mouth are fused shut.

Before she knows it an unforgettable, unforgivable face surrounds her. Large posters dot the walls, grinning down at her from their blown up, larger than life glory and she hears that same voice again, feels it close in on her like flames licking at a refrigerator.

It comes to her like a physical blow and she absorbs the impact like everything else that has happened in the night. _Like father, like son._ And as quickly as it comes, it goes. His father never looked at her with such concern and his father never took her hand softly and carefully, never breaking eye contact as he stepped backwards.

They’re in his room and she knows the walls and the deep thick carpet and the color of the bedspread and the feel of his mattress under her back. Her lungs expand with the ease of familiarity.

She wants to close her eyes and keep them that way. Here, in his room, the entire night comes crashing down on her. The panic, the terror, the stupidity, the certainty of death, the relief and all the answers she’s ever going to need.

Her fingers itch with forgotten injuries, the nail of the ring finger of her right hand is jagged, pooling blood, having caught on the inside lid of the fridge. _No! Please, please, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease…!_. The skin on her wrists itches inside the bandages added as an afterthought to her burns as she waited for her father to come out of emergency.

He has led her here, guided her from the hospital to the car to the house, but she’s still surrounded by an impenetrable bubble, a thick surface of air that can’t be trespassed. There’s only her and each time she closes her eyes, the lids get so heavy she’s betting that the next time they won’t open.

It zaps at her like a jolt of electricity when he touches her, his fingers wrapping around her hand and lifting it up. His skin rasps against hers and she can feel the name _Echolls_ in every molecule.

She can see it with his eyes; dirty and smoke covered and damaged. Her skin itches to pull back and away, to hide it, but she doesn’t, she stays still under his questioning gaze and wonders if her pores will tell him the story that she can’t.

He steps back, dropping her hand carefully, and she lets it float, forgotten in mid air as she watches him turn to the bathroom, watches him test the water and add scented oils and fuss. Always fuss; his movements are small and jerky, nervous, lost.

She wants to tell him to stop, to slow down, to just…

Her throat pulsates around sticky words that won’t come. _Slow down_. And her eyes are the only part of her that moves, blinking slowly as her clothes begin to disappear one by one. Each piece, she tells herself, will be the last. _No. Stop. Leave me alone._

She almost felt her skin peeled off like paintwork bubbling in the flames and she needs the feeling of layers keeping it on.

And as the air caresses her bared flesh like cold fingers, she can feel traces of the night like sticky streaks. Gooseflesh dots her arms and legs and hip and it feels almost triumphant. It’s normal, it’s human, it’s _alive_.

 _I’m alive._ But the words don’t come and he doesn’t hear her thoughts. _I didn’t give up._

And that’s the thought that sticks in her mind. It registers beyond the night, beyond the past few days and weeks and months. It started well before his sheets silky against her thighs. Somewhere far back, amid long hair and pastel colors and candy necklaces and innocence lost.

 _I never gave in_.

His arms come up under her knees and shoulders and suddenly she’s lifted in the air, suspended momentarily before she feels the comforting sinking feeling of water warm against her body. She lets herself fall limp into the tub, careful of her bandaged wrists, and everything lingering on her skin begins to soak away.

It’s like a physical action, layers of the past two years being peeled away, the sharp fingernails of the water picking at the edges of all the taunts, the sight of her best friend’s body, waking up that morning.

She can hold on to it all.

Or she can let it go.

She blinks.

_It was your dad._

And it starts with him. It starts with conversation, with a level of trust she’s not sure she’s ever shared with anyone.

_He… he… he…_

Water, flowing out of a cup onto her shoulders, clean and crisp, stops as his hand shakes. He tries to tell her that it’s okay, that everything is going to be okay, but she can tell the words are instinct, a need to comfort and console. They aren’t truth.

_I thought it was you._

She’s not even sure why she’s telling him. Maybe she needs to get the words out, maybe she needs to let him know. It’s not okay, it’s not okay that she thought it and it’s not okay that he made her think it.

 _I’d never…_ He seems truly puzzled. _How could you think…?_

And she remembers blood on her lip and bruises on her hips and a vicious nasty gleam in his eyes. She remembers roughness and broken glass and a sneer on his lips. She remembers her best friend laughing and the two of them kissing and loud, violent arguments.

She remembers the first time the thought sliced its way into her brain and she couldn’t breathe.

 _Because you lied about your alibi._ She thinks maybe she still can’t. _Because you had a volatile relationship with Lilly._

She remembers hating him, she remembers scratching trails through his skin, remembers fighting him. She remembers it like a movie she watched, a disturbing, horrible movie, distant and far-fetched.

_Because you have a history of violence with women._

He looks gutted by her statement.

 _No._ He stresses the word desperately, again and again; like it’s the only thing he knows how to say. _No._

She remembers the moment she forgave him. Non descript, non eventful, one day at school, when he looked her way and it hadn’t even occurred to her, until minutes later when he was already gone, to protect herself.

 _No?_ She has spent so long protecting herself from this boy that it is second nature and to do anything else would be foolish. _Just me, then?_

But she has never been swayed in her opinion once she has made up her mind.

She takes a deep breath, drowns her lungs in oxygen, and sinks fully into the tub. The water swallows her welcomingly, swirling and swishing and caressing, fingers of it stroking her thighs and abdomen and nose.

Bubbles fizz about her, trapped air, and her eyes fight the eddy of it, stubbornly refuse to close as she watches the world above her. A kaleidoscope of moving colors and shapes and broken water reflections.

Slowly, thickly, the water begins to settle and as her body fights her direction to stay low, struggling to push up, her chest burns. The picture begins to settle, begins to take shape, and she knows it.

His face, staring down at her, and she makes a conscious decision as she pushes her heels in and breaks the surface.

It all comes down on her at once, the air and the sound and the sight of it all, unbroken and whole, a fresh new start. His hand slides against her knee and for a second she doesn’t question it. But then she does, because she the words she wants are still stuck.

 _Slow down_.

He doesn’t seem to listen and when he pulls the plug, she’s grateful.

The water pulls at her skin, sucking down the drain in a long, thick wave, and she can feel everything ugly she didn’t want just slide off. Her limbs fall gracelessly to the porcelain of the tub and she feels her weight like a welcome thing.

He lifts her like she weighs nothing and she thinks that it’s appropriate.

She remains still as he tends to her, wrapping her hair and drying her limbs. She wonders if he can feel the difference, the vague distance of before compared to the willing compliance of now. If he realizes how much it costs to let him be the one.

His initials are embroidered on the thick, fluffy gown he wraps around her, tacky and overblown and nothing more than another status of his wealth to lord over everyone and she traces the slightly fraying L. He is, she thinks to herself, beautiful in his own way. He is sharp and ugly and vicious, but when it counts he is gentle and soft, if you know where to look and when.

If you ask.

She follows him to the bed and she almost wants him to say something, to do something, to ask questions or force her hand. But he doesn’t, he’s fallen into the ease of acceptance. She thinks that would be a fine place to stay.

But she can’t.

She rolls towards him, faces him fully on the bed, and their bodies are warm and comfortable.

_He was really going to kill me._

And what she means is: we have to change, we can’t keep doing this, I’m dwindling down to nothing and I can’t take it anymore.

_I thought I was going to die._

And what she means is: you can’t let me.

He brings his hand around to cup her head and she rests it on his shoulder, listens to his heart through the beat of the pulse in his neck.

_I found I didn’t want to._

It feels right.

***


End file.
